I am very late with this post this week. Usually I have my post written on Friday and just waiting to link up to the Prop on Saturday. This week though has been weird, I go out into the garden for 10 minutes of weeding and come back in to find that hours have passed me by. On Tuesday I took my car into Hayle for a service and MOT which was due by tomorrow. I dithered about using the six month extension, but I rely on the test to check my car is working as it should be along with the service to fix any niggles. She is an elderly car now (12 years old tomorrow) so things are starting to wear out. Anyway, it meant I had 3 hours to kill with no cafés or toilets open! I could have taken a bus to St Ives or even Truro, but instead I decided to have a 5 mile circular walk along the George V Memorial Walk gardens and around the Towans along Hayle beach. Wednesday was spent recovering from a long and tiring walk in the heat! Thursday and Friday just disappeared with gardening and shopping and then late on Friday my herb plug plants arrived so this morning I had to get them planted or they’d surely die in the packaging!
(1) So let’s begin with the herb garden. Normally I plant herbs in one of the raised beds, but this year I am trying out the hexagonal pots I bought a couple of years ago especially for herbs, which ended up with spring bulbs that were still flowering when the herbs arrived. The herb garden has become a bit of a dumping ground nursery for young perennials to get started in. There are three kinds of mint – apple, spearmint and Moroccan mint (plus my old ginger mint — the chocolate mint died), lemon balm, Thyme x Golden Queen and Silver Queen, French tarragon (my old plant died this winter), and one pot already contains three types of thyme – Snowdrift, Caraway and Lemon. Other herbs such as Sage and Common Thyme were planted in the herb bed after the forget-me-nots had been evicted!
(2) Rosa Gertrude Jekyll. Many SoSers featured her last week. I am trying to persuade mine to grow as a climber and I must say that this is the best year yet for flowers. They don’t last very long though, but they do have an intense perfume. A shame she is tucked away behind the Weeping Kilmarnock Willow tree and at the bottom of the raised beds.
(3) Geranium x oxonianum the dreary pink ones which flower in sun and shade but have so many leaves! I spent a lot of time earlier in the month pulling out self-seeded ones from around my gravel garden as they simply take over. However in the ‘woodland border’ they do add some colour and the flowers are actually very pretty.
(4) Viola ‘Fiona’ one of three named varieties that I bought last year which have survived the wet winter. Fiona is very hardy apparently! She is also very highly scented. I hope she continues to stay with me.
(5) Another daisy. I said that I was somewhat obsessed with daisy flowers. Well this one is Erigeron x glaucus ‘Sea Breeze’ / fleabane which grows in my sunny wall in the gravel garden. It is spreading nicely and I have cuttings from it in a raised bed and also the Cornish hedge.
(6) Talking of Cornish hedge, the Campanula is flowering again. This is Campanula x persicifolia ‘Blue Bell’ / fairy bellflower which has slender, upright stems that carry large open cups of large violet-blue flowers. Last year it got a bit munched, but this year it seems to be holding its own, so far. It is rather a graceful flower and somewhat wasted out in the ‘Wild Garden’.
And shortly after I finished the herb planting, some newly shorn sheep arrived at the farmyard. Usually the haulage company take them in to the yard itself, but for some reason they dropped them off at the end of the lane and marched them by my car parking area (the Wild Garden). Some of them stopped for a munch of the stuff growing in the part of the garden that I haven’t done anything to yet, this is a low wall which I want to rejuvenate and maybe plant rockery flowers in, or alternatively plant a fuchsia or wild rose hedge to hide the breeze-block wall. I am only glad there wasn’t anything expensive growing there!
Phew! Still Saturday, but now I must go and cook dinner so I shall be visiting the other sixers tomorow. As always, if you want a peek over other people’s garden walls then please pop over to our host, the lovely Jon, AKA ‘The Propagator’ where you find links to many more wonderful garden enthusiasts from all over the world.
Remember to stay alert out there!
See here for the participant’s guide.
Cornwall in Colours 
You did have a busy week Jude. How rude of those sheep to help themselves, and that flower is way too pretty to have the name Fleabane. 🙂
I am a big fan of the Gertrude Jekyll Rose and I really cannot understand why I have not bought it for myself! I have no room left in the garden though. Lovely photo’s Jude. I hope you are staying safe down there.
lovely. no sign of my campanula persicifolia this year, dunno why. just vanished. i like the idea of a nursery bed, i might re-purpose one of my veg beds. in fact i might repurpose all of them, my veg growing is a bit poor.
I am surprised that any of your flowers reappear given how densely you plant! I have removed all the forget me nots now to allow light to the ground! A couple of plants I thought had died are making a revival, but both of the Heleniums have disappeared. 😢
Love the Erigeron and also the Campanula. I don’t know where the time goes these days and haven’t a clue what I’ll do when I can eventually start working again!